From the Magazine

Mica Ertegun, the Nonagenarian Style Legend Who Shows No Signs of Stopping

Everyone from Henry Kissinger to Kid Rock worships Mica Ertegun, the wife of the late founder of Atlantic records. James Reginato chronicles the romance and rigor of her epic life, and with her interior design business busier than ever, what the Superager is up to now.

PORTRAITS OF STYLELeft, a Horst portrait of Ahmet and Mica Ertegun
at Regine’s, in New York City, photographed by
Bill Cunningham, 1977. Right, Mica Ertegun in her Manhattan apartment, 1969.

Photographs from the Conde Nast archive.

There can’t be another nonagenarian today who is as tight with Henry
Kissinger and Annette de la Renta as she is with Kid Rock and the
members of Led Zeppelin.

But, then, Ioana Maria Banu, “Mica” Ertegun, who turned 90 on October
21, is one of the most intriguing senior citizens around. For 45 years
she was married to Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born co-founder of
Atlantic Records, who reigned as the most influential titan of the music
industry for five decades as he shaped the careers of artists ranging
from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones. All the while, the couple
was the virtual definition of sophistication, and they set a new gold
standard for fine living at their homes in New York City, Southampton,
Paris, and Bodrum, Turkey.

Mica’s unique personal style—her blend of the austere and the
exotic—made her a fashion icon. (She was named to the International
Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1971.) It infused not only her houses
but also many others’. In 1967, she and her best friend, Chessy Rayner,
founded a decorating firm, which they named with their initials, MAC II.
(They liked the ring of it because “it sounded like a trucking firm,”
Mica explains.)

With Rayner’s death from lung cancer at age 66 in 1998 and Ahmet’s
sudden death at age 83 in 2006—after a fall at a Rolling Stones
concert in New York celebrating the 60th birthday of Bill Clinton—many
wondered if Mica would keep going. But there she was in Brooklyn, at
11:30 on a Friday night last spring, at the Barclays Center, toasting
Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, and the other 2016 inductees into the Rock &
Roll Hall of Fame. Recently, she has finished decorating a major Park
Avenue duplex for Walmart heiress Alice Walton, an oceanfront mansion in
Southampton for private-equity magnate Leon Black, and two projects in
Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, as Ertegun jets around to her various residences, she is
overseeing significant philanthropic endeavors. In December, Aretha
Franklin serenaded her at the dedication of the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun
Atrium, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, made possible by Mica’s
$9 million gift. Several times a year, she travels to Oxford to check
on progress at the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Graduate Scholarship
Programme, launched in 2012 with her $41 million pledge—the largest
gift for humanities students in the university’s 900-year history.

On March 19, she was in Jerusalem, where her largesse accomplished
arguably the most miraculous-sounding feat in the annals of modern
philanthropy: the reopening of the tomb of Jesus Christ. Ertegun
provided a lead gift of $1.4 million to the World Monuments Fund, which
enabled the restoration of the Edicule, the structure inside the
4th-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre that covers the cave where,
many of the faithful believe, Jesus was entombed. Since the 19th
century, the limestone-and-marble Edicule had been in danger of collapse
and was shored up by an ugly iron cage. At a ceremony celebrating the
restoration, the costs of which totaled nearly $4 million, Theophilos
III, Patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem and All Palestine, issued a
proclamation naming Mica “Great Cross-Bearer,” the Greek Orthodox
Church of Jerusalem’s highest honor, and told her, “Mica, you made the
impossible possible.”

On a side table in the library of her New York City town house, a picture of
Mick Jagger, Ahmet, and Jann Wenner.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The front lawn of Boatman House.

The pool at Boatman House.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Mica’s yacht, Ioana Maria, off the coast of Bodrum.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Mica on her yacht, Ioana Maria, in Bodrum, Turkey.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Boatman House, her estate in Southampton, New York.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Her New York City living room.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The living
room in Aga Konak.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

A guest bedroom at Aga Konak, her Bodrum house.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

On a side table in the library of her New York City town house, a picture of
Mick Jagger, Ahmet, and Jann Wenner.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The front lawn of Boatman House.

The pool at Boatman House.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Last summer, as Ertegun approached her 90th birthday, her sterling
legacy seemed secure. But on August 16 many of her devoted friends were
shocked and disturbed to open up the New York Post and see a blaring
headline—“ERTEGUN’S WIDOW ‘TERRORIZED’ ”—at the top of Richard
Johnson’s column.

According to Johnson, “longtime friends” of Mica “are worried she has
fallen under the control of Linda Wachner, former CEO of Warnaco
. . . [who] won’t let Mica, 89, see her old friends.”

“She controls Mica’s life,” claimed Sheldon Vogel, former vice
chairman of Atlantic Records. An unnamed “old friend” went so far as
to say that Ertegun is “being terrorized in her own home” by Wachner.

Had Ertegun’s life turned into some nightmare reminiscent of What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane?

Several close friends of Ertegun’s whom I contacted after the story was
published agreed that Mica is now “frail” and that Wachner, 71, is her
near-constant companion—but all debunked any sinister accusations
against Wachner.

“I had lunch with both of them a few months ago. I see nothing untoward
going on . . . and happen to think Linda is a blessing for Mica,”
says close friend and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who went on
to call the allegations “baseless and without credibility.”

“The idea that Linda is keeping Mica away from her old friends is
absurd,” says music-industry mogul Lyor Cohen. “They came over to my
house in Sag Harbor a month ago, and both were in great spirits.”

Meanwhile, Boaz Mazor, a longtime Oscar de la Renta executive, had a
“very jolly” dinner with the two ladies recently. “If I want Mica, I
get Mica,” he says. “Maybe the people saying these things are people
Mica doesn’t want to see.”

“Mica calls her own shots. She is still in charge of herself,” vouches
Louise Grunwald, a leader of society and philanthropy in New York.
“Linda is devoted to her, but she’s not getting anything out of it
financially. She’s not stealing one penny.”

“Mica is a total original who has never copied anyone,” says Boaz
Mazor, an Oscar de la Renta executive.

“There is no elder abuse here, nor is there going to be,” Grunwald
adds. “Nobody who knows Mica is going to allow what happened to Brooke
Astor to happen to her.” Certainly, Ertegun (who called the Post’s
story “completely false” in a letter she wrote to Johnson, with Rupert
Murdoch in c.c.) was not being kept from her old friends the night of
October 21, when Wachner invited 37 of them to La Grenouille to
celebrate Mica’s 90th birthday. In addition to the abovementioned
friends and others such as Mercedes Bass and Princess Firyal of Jordan,
the guest list included the Reverend Father Alexander Karloutsos,
Ertegun’s Greek Orthodox pastor; several of her doctors; the staff of
MAC II; and Bette Midler, who sang “Happy Birthday.”

“I think [the gathering] speaks for itself,” Wachner told me.

Mica and Bill Blass at Mortimer’s, in New York City, 1983.

By Tony Palmieri/Penske Media/Rex/Shutterstock.

Life During Wartime

‘We had a beautiful house in Romania,” Mica recalls of her childhood.
“It was very luxurious.” She was the only child of Natalia Gologan and
Dr. Gheorghe Banu, a physician who served in the Cabinet of the
government that ruled under King Carol II. Mica acquired her nickname
after her German nurse kept hearing her father call her “mic,”
Romanian for “the little one.”

During bombing raids by the Allies in World War II, Mica was evacuated
from Bucharest to her family’s country house, outside the capital. In
1942, when she was 16, she married Stefan Grecianu, son of another
land-owning family, who was 15 years her senior and whose mother was a
lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie of Romania.

On January 10, 1948, 11 days after King Michael (who had succeeded Carol
II) was forced to abdicate by Romania’s new Communist government, Mica
and her husband boarded one of the two trains on which members of the
royal family were sent into their exile. “[The authorities] told us
we could take everything,” Mica recalls. “When we got on the train,
they took everything. But I was so happy to be out.”

Traveling on Nansen passports—issued to stateless people by the League
of Nations—the party ended up in Zurich, where, according to The Last
Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun, a biography by Robert
Greenfield published in 2011, they boarded at the elegant Dolder Grand
hotel, though none of them had a dime to pay. By grace and favor, the
group stayed for nearly a year.

Kind fellow guests they befriended helped get the young couple on their
feet. Family friends shepherded them to Paris, where Mica got modeling
jobs for a few months. Some “very rich Canadians,” as Mica describes
them, later lent them funds to move to a town on the shore of Lake
Ontario and purchase a farm. In spite of having had to take care of
5,000 chickens whose eggs she had to collect, wash, and box, Mica looks
back fondly on the nearly 10 years she spent there, rising every morning
at five to collect eggs but dressing at night for candelabra-lit
dinners. “We had to create a world,” she says. “It was tough, but it
was the best time of my life. When you are young, anything can be
great.”

When She Met Ahmet

Mica’s life was transformed after she took a trip to New York in the
fall of 1958 to meet with the Turkish ambassador to the United Nations
in the hope that he could help her get her father out of Romania, where
he had been imprisoned by the Communists. Because Mica seemed so sad,
the wife of the ambassador (who, when he had been posted to Romania, had
met Mica’s father) arranged for Mica to join a dinner party at the Bon
Soir, a small but lively cabaret in Greenwich Village. Among the guests
was Ahmet Ertegun, then 35.

When Ahmet was two, his father, Mehmet, the legal counselor to Kemal
Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was named minister to
Switzerland. Two years later, he was sent to Geneva to be the Turkish
observer to the League of Nations, and later he served as ambassador to
France, the Court of St. James’s, and, finally, the United States,
during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

The Erteguns had moved into the ornate Turkish Embassy, on Massachusetts
Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1934. Ahmet, then 12, and his brother,
Nesuhi, 16, attended the elite St. Albans School. But the boys,
fascinated by black culture, spent as much time as they could combing
through record shops and visiting theaters in the city’s black
neighborhoods.

Mehmet, then the dean of the diplomatic corps, died of a heart attack in
1944, when Ahmet was 21. His body was kept in Arlington National
Cemetery for 17 months before President Truman sent it back to Turkey on
the U.S.S. Missouri, and Ahmet’s mother, Hayrunnisa, and sister, Selma,
repatriated.

The brothers remained in America. In 1947, in partnership with a friend
and bankrolled by a $10,000 loan from his dentist, Ahmet founded
Atlantic Records. When he met Mica that evening at the Bon Soir, Ertegun
had just resumed bachelorhood, after a two-year marriage to a
Swedish-American actress who was said to resemble Greta Garbo.

“Mica has a mythic presence,” says Larry Gagosian. “She is flawless,
kind of a Jackie O.”

Ertegun’s first impression of Mica, according to his biographer, Robert
Greenfield, was: “She had a greater elegance and aristocracy than any
of the girls I knew. She was much more of a lady.”

“He was a man like nobody else,” she tells me. “He was a man who
fascinated me.”

After Mica returned to Canada, Ahmet called her frequently on the farm,
where she talked to him on a hand-cranked phone. On one occasion he flew
to meet her in Montreal, where he arranged a suite for her at the
Ritz-Carlton. There, in a closet, he had hidden a small band, which
emerged to serenade her with “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” among other songs.

“It was very hard to leave my husband—he was very, very nice,” Mica
says. But on April 6, 1961, she married Ahmet in a small ceremony in a
Manhattan apartment. “I think the most important choice I ever made in
my life was to marry her,” he told Greenfield.

Yet his career puzzled her. “I knew opera—but I didn’t know what I
was listening to with him,” she recalls. “Boom, boom, boom. After an
hour, I said, ‘I can’t stand this!’ ” In time, whatever her opinions
of the music, Mica became very fond of the artists in Ahmet’s stable who
made it. “I like them all . . . some of them very much,” she says.
(Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Eric Clapton, and Stephen Stills are among
her favorites.)

While Ahmet immersed himself in the record business, Mica set about
decorating the five-story town house they had bought on East 81st
Street. The young couple’s charm clearly registered with the right
people. “I had them to dinner before anyone you know had them to
dinner. Ten—more than ten—years ago,” Diana Vreeland told The New
Yorker in 1978. “But why did I ask them back?,” Vreeland pondered.
“It was the energy. Of course, it was the energy.”

Vreeland’s quotes appeared in a two-part, 60-page, 33,000-word profile
of Ahmet. Even by the standards of The New Yorker in its flushest days,
the piece was completed on generous terms for its author, George W. S.
Trow, who took seven years to write it. During that time he virtually
embedded himself with the couple, accompanying them in first-class
cabins, limousines, five-star hotels, and on private planes and
countless champagne-soaked evenings. No wonder he stretched it out to
seven years. But it was apparently worth the wait to the magazine’s
editor, William Shawn. “This piece is Proust,” he told Trow after
reading the manuscript.

At one point in the article, Mica and Ahmet are at the last concert at
the Fillmore East. Trow’s diary entry after the occasion: “Mica in
striking black dress. Other record-company presidents floored by
Mica . . . . Minor record-company president asked Mica if she liked
Allman Brothers Band.”

“Yah,” Mica said. “They are divine, no?”

Trow later goes on to parse this expression, which, he observed, was
typical of her delivery of simple sentences, “in a manner that implied
authority or indifference, or both . . . . This expression can mean
‘Yes, it’s divine, I couldn’t agree more’ or ‘Yes, it’s divine, but why
bring it up?’ or ‘No, I don’t think it’s divine’ or ‘I wish you would go
away.’ ”

Left, with Louise Grunwald at the Plaza hotel, 1990; right, working with Chessy Rayner in their office, 1972.

On the Town

As Ahmet reached the apex of the music industry, Ahmet and Mica summited
international society. The lunches, dinners, and parties they gave,
whether at one of their houses or the most fashionable venues of the day
(La Côte Basque, Mortimer’s, the Cotton Club, Roseland Ballroom, and
Cannes’s Hôtel Majestic, to name a few), always drew an exciting mixture
of boldfaced names. Gianni Agnelli, Jacqueline Onassis, Andy Warhol,
Brooke Astor, Kay Graham, and the like would be seated next to Ahmet’s
music stars, such as Jagger, Plant, and Midler.

“It was all very heady and glamorous,” says Midler. “I came from
Hawaii, I had no background, and this was so rarefied. I remember being
incredibly impressed by the experience—the house was so beautiful, the
food was so exquisite, the service impeccable.”

“They could put a dinner together with a glamorous cast of characters
better than anyone,” recalls TV producer Douglas Cramer, a friend of
the couple’s and a client of Mica’s. “They reached into the worlds of
art, music, theater, literature, business . . . . So you might find
David Hockney, Joan Collins, David Geffen, Steve Schwartzman, Sandy
Weill, Joan Didion, Larry Gagosian.”

“I prefer simplicity,” Mica Ertegun says. “Some people want to buy
things just because they cost a million dollars.”

“They really knew how to do it,” says Gagosian. “I never turned down
an invitation from them. They were a magical couple. Mica has a mythic
presence—she is flawless, kind of a Jackie O.”

“Mica was surely one of the most sophisticated people I’ve ever met,”
says another frequent guest, Jann Wenner. “She didn’t care if you were
Eric Clapton or Henry Kissinger—she welcomed everybody in equally and
brought these worlds together. But you came up to her level; she didn’t
come down to yours.”

It was common knowledge, however, that Ahmet’s partying extended far
beyond (or beneath) his refined evenings with Mica.

“I could never keep up with Ahmet,” Jagger said at the star-studded
tribute in 2007 for the mogul. He “was a father figure, this is true.
But to me, he was more like the wicked uncle with a wicked chuckle.”

“Sure, he fucked around,” says Wenner. “My interpretation is that she
just loved him so much she was willing to let certain things slide.”

In the later years of his life, Ertegun’s favorite carousing companion
was Kid Rock, whose albums were distributed by Atlantic beginning in
1998.

According to the entertainer, Mica was a model of understanding: “One
time I was in Mexico with my girl at the time, renting out this most
amazing villa,” he says. “But after two days, I had nothing to say to
her. I was bored out of my mind. I thought, I want to get some people
here. At that time, I didn’t know too many people with private
planes—but Ahmet had one. So I called his house. Mica answered. I told
her what shenanigans I was up to and said, ‘Look, I’ve got this great
spot. I know Ahmet’s got a plane . . .’ She said, ‘Oh, call him. He’s
in Beverly Hills—I’m sure he’d love to come.’ Next day he was there.
She didn’t pay no mind.”

He also recalls the time “after a three-day bender” when he showed up
at the door of the Ertegun house in Southampton. “I was a mess. She
welcomed me right in, didn’t look down on me,” he says. “Some nights
we got wild, me and Ahmet—music blasting, telling dirty jokes, on the
table,” he continues. “And I never saw that look of disgust on her
face that I’ve seen on so many other women, when they reach that point:
Get out. She would either just hang out with us and smile or go do her
own thing.

“But you held Mica in the highest regard and respect,” he concludes.
“Ahmet demanded that, and she gave off an aura that was so wonderful
you had no choice but to respect her to the nines. That’s just who she
is.”

“Mica is very intelligent in a European way,” comments Jean Pigozzi, a
close friend of both Erteguns. “She knew Ahmet always loved her and she
was the No. 1 woman in his life, but obviously he was philandering. A
typical Park Avenue or Beverly Hills wife would have made a scandal out
of it and destroyed the marriage, but she behaved in a very elegant way,
and they had a great marriage, bound by a remarkable, incredible mutual
respect. A lot of American women should learn from Mica.”

Mica’s unflappable attitude extended to houseguests, though not all of
them felt the same way, as Pigozzi recalls of a stay at a villa in
Barbados that the Erteguns had rented. “Jerry Zipkin was there along
with Jimmy Page and his girlfriend. Every day she got stoned, and after
lunch she passed out in the nearest room, which was Jerry’s. He hated
it!” Mica, he adds, “kind of elegantly ignored it all.”

Page and other members of Led Zeppelin certainly demonstrated their
esteem for Ahmet after his death, when they re-united for their first
concert performance in 27 years to play at London’s 02 Arena in his
honor. The $5.2 million revenue from the event, per an agreement
between Mica Ertegun and Led Zeppelin, was donated to education in the
U.S. and Europe, including, at St. John’s College, Oxford, an
undergraduate music program established in Ahmet Ertegun’s name.

“Perhaps more than anything else [Mica] is patient,” says David
Geffen. “I have known her for almost 50 years now and have never seen
her lose her temper even when there is nothing but chaos around her.
Ahmet was a very lucky man.”

“I never minded, because I knew it wasn’t against me,” says Mica about
her husband’s freewheeling ways. “I knew I was the best thing in his
life.”

She was good for his business too. “When I was running Warner’s
[which had acquired Atlantic Records in 1967], Kid Rock was
frequently angry with me,” says Lyor Cohen. “Often, it was the steady
hand of Mica who calmed him down.”

In 1978, it was Mica who resolved a major dispute with the Rolling
Stones, over a lyric written on the title track of the album Some Girls:
“Black girls just wanna get fucked all night.” It was meant, according
to the band, to be ironic. But Ahmet, incensed by any form of racism,
insisted the line be rewritten before he would release the album. A
deadlock ensued for weeks, until Mica, who had become friendly with
Jagger, persuaded Ahmet to release the disc, which subsequently sold
more than nine million copies.

“She was my touchstone of civility during the overwhelming chaos of
those tumultuous times,” vouches Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young. “When fame struck the rube, she reminded me that,
underneath it all, I was a gentleman.”

“She was impossibly spellbinding,” he adds. “She was, without
question, the most classically elegant woman I have ever had the good
fortune to know. She has a way of making one stand a little straighter
and mind one’s manners.”

Mica, photographed in her office by Harry Benson, 2012.

Photograph from the Condé Nast Archive.

Designing Women

Early on in her marriage, Mica wisely decided to carve out a life of her
own. “He was very busy, so I thought I would go to school.” Encouraged
by the success she had had in doing up her own town house, she enrolled
in the New York School of Interior Design. She soon went into business
with Chesbrough Lewis Hall, a debutante from Ohio who had married
William P. Rayner, an executive at Condé Nast, where her stepfather, Iva
S. V. Patcevitch, was chairman.

“We became great friends,” says Mica. “She had no children, I had no
children, so we started working. It became a business.”

In the early years, “the girls,” as they were often called, were
treated somewhat dismissively by the decorating establishment; they were
seen as rich ladies with time on their hands. “Mica does not have to
work,” commented the fearsome Sister Parish (who no doubt didn’t like
losing out on jobs to MAC II).

Soon they had major fans, and clients, among whom was fashion designer
Bill Blass. “There aren’t any two girls in New York with more on the
ball, more of a flair for food, for clothes, for living, than Mica and
Chessy,” he told Vogue in 1972.

Their “look”—clean, crisp, pared back, unfussy—was a real breath
of fresh air from the then fashionable heavy, chintz-filled interiors,
and it had a significant influence on contemporary taste.

“Mica never puts a wrong foot forward. She has the most refined eye,”
says Annette de la Renta. “It is minimalistic, but at the same time
there are exuberant touches.”

There has always been a close connection between Mica’s style in fashion
and in interiors. “Everything follows suit,” says Louise Grunwald.
“Mica’s look is austere and strict. She is architectural in her dress,
and in her interiors there is never any froufrou. No fringe on the
lampshades for Mica. She likes bold, masculine furniture—like William
IV or Charles X pieces, not spindly French things. She didn’t go for the
glitz other people went for. But you can’t put a label on her
style—it’s a very eclectic mixture.”

“Mica is a total original who has never copied anyone,” says Boaz
Mazor. “Bill [Blass] and Oscar got a lot of ideas and inspiration
from her. She would go to the bazaar in Bodrum and come back with some
19th-century embroidered tunic or caftan, for example, and Oscar would
just flip over it. Sometimes we would bring it back to our studio to
copy it. But no one ever wore it better than Mica.”

Initially, MAC II’s office was in a large closet in the Ertegun town
house. In 1976, the firm moved into the five-story town house adjacent
to the Ertegun residence, where it remains. Today, Mica’s clients marvel
at her stamina and work ethic. “She’s on the job site at 9:30 in the
morning on the dot,” says Douglas Cramer, for whom MAC II has decorated
two houses (on St. Martin and in Connecticut) and overseen four
Manhattan apartment renovations (most recently at River House). “And
she shows up perfectly coiffed and made-up, looking like she’s just
stepped out of Bergdorf’s window.”

Although there is grandeur in Mica’s interiors, there’s a sparseness and
understatement to them as well. “I prefer simplicity,” she says. “I
hate things that are rich and ugly. Some people want to buy things just
because they cost a million dollars.”

Her own residences, of course, are the best illustrations of her style.
In her 81st Street town house, she knocked down the walls of three rooms
to create a dramatic loft-like drawing room, which she filled with a
small but magnificent collection of modern art along with superb
Russian, French, and German antique furniture.

In the early 90s, the Erteguns commissioned architect Jaquelin T.
Robertson to design a house for them in Southampton. Boatman House, as
it is named, resembles a neoclassical Russian dacha, where a staggering
40-foot-square, two-story living room is furnished with monumentally
scaled Turkish portraits. Some inspiration came from their friend and
neighbor across the street, William Paley, whose house also featured a
large square room. (In building Boatman House, Robertson designed the
exterior ocher-grained stone steps at a gentle gradation in order to
accommodate a ramp for Paley’s wheelchair when he came to dinner: “the
Bill Paley stairs,” as Robertson christened them.) One of the guest
bedrooms was dedicated as “Swifty’s room” and was painted in sumptuous
dark-Edwardian-green stripes to please “superagent” Irving Lazar.

The only residence at which the Erteguns infrequently entertained is
their Right Bank Paris apartment. Mica still visits it several times a
year, and it seems to be her private sanctuary.

Over the decades, the place where the Erteguns lived largest was Aga
Konak, in Bodrum, on the south coast of Turkey. The 10-bedroom, 15-bath
stone house served as one of the great pleasure domes for high society
and rock ‘n’ roll from the 1970s onward. But when Mica and Ahmet found
the property, it was a ruin with no roof. Mica transformed it into “a
dream,” according to repeat guest Lyor Cohen.

“It was done in an easy way that was beyond elegance,” he says. “It
is the only real elegance. Everything else feels fraudulent.” With
Mica, he says, “it just is.”

“You were immediately enchanted,” says Midler, who, with her husband
and daughter, visited several times. “There was a serenity about it.”

“The breakfasts!” she continues. “We had never eaten like that.
Beautiful homemade breads and marmalades, feta cheese, honey, fresh-mint
tea. And the figs! Figs, figs, figs. It was all just perfect.”

Fortitude and Faith

On October 29, 2006, the Erteguns were doing what they excelled at:
mixing with the titans of music and society, at the Beacon Theater, in
New York. They went to the lounge to have a drink before the Stones’
Clinton Foundation benefit concert to mark Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday.
After exiting a bathroom, where a light wasn’t working, Ahmet stumbled
on a step and fell backward, hitting his head.

A few days later, after a series of strokes, he went into a coma at New
York-Presbyterian Hospital, where Mica kept a near-constant vigil for
six weeks as distraught friends came to visit. (Though there were
moments of levity. “I was sitting there with Mica and looking at
Ahmet,” recalls Wenner. “ ‘It’s amazing how good-looking he is,’ I
said to her. ‘Why does he look so good?’ ‘Well, of course,’ she said,
‘he hasn’t been drinking.’ ”)

A few days after his death, on December 14, Ahmet’s body was flown to
Turkey on Paul Allen’s 757 and buried in a cemetery overlooking the
Bosporus, where his parents are interred.

“When he died . . . it was so unexpected . . . it was very
difficult,” says Mica.

The death of Chessy Rayner was sorrowful as well. “It was a terrible
thing. I thought I wasn’t going to go on . . .”

But on she has gone, and she has no plans to retire. “And do what?”
she asks rhetorically. “Buy diamonds? I like to work . . . it’s not
so tragic,” she says with the hint of a smile.

With seven people on staff at MAC II, the office is buzzing, and Ertegun
on a recent day was preparing for yet another visit to Oxford. “I’m in
love with it. It’s so civilized and fantastic,” she says about the
Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme there. Thanks to Mica’s gift, up
to 35 graduate students annually will receive scholarships to study the
humanities, and they will have the use of a study center, Mica and Ahmet
Ertegun House, a five-story Georgian-era building that she also helped
redesign. According to Antony Green in the university’s development
office, Ertegun’s gift has been “absolutely transformative for the
study of the humanities at Oxford University.”

“For Ahmet and for me, one of the great joys of life has been the study
of history, music, languages, literature, art, and archaeology . . . .
I believe it is tremendously important to support those things that
endure across time . . . and make the world a more humane place,”
she said when her donation was announced. In January, in recognition of
this benefaction, H.M. the Queen made Ertegun an honorary Commander of
the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

“She’s a classy lady, to sum it up,” says Henry Kissinger. His
sentiments are expressed just slightly differently by Kid Rock. “She’s
one of the coolest ladies I’ve ever been privileged to know,” he says.
“I wish she would start an etiquette school for young ladies.”

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